I posted this on the help forum but it occurred to me that it might be better posted here in case anyone missed it on the busier forum. I e-mailed LXF about this and was told that they think it ought to be fairly easy to sort out though it is well beyond my meagre capabilities. Sorry if you find the re-post annoying but I would like an answer.

I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop partly because of the price but also because my Brother's Inspiron 1000 works so well with Suse 10. I put Suse 10.0 on it and sorted out the widescreen with resolution 855 but the sound is odd. If you plug in the headphones they don't mute the speakers. If you listen to anything in Amarok or Real Player the PCM channel mutes without the sliders moving in alsamixer or the sliders move down to zero without the mute light coming on in kmix. Playing any soundfile in audacity gives a clicky result. CDs play but no sound in kscd but play with sound in soundjuicer and in kaffeine. DVDs play fine with good sound in xine and kaffeine.
If I look in yast it tells me that the soundcard is 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller, Configured as sound card number 0, Driver snd-hda-intel. If I delete and try to add the soundcard again it tells me an error occurred "The kernel module snd-hda-intel for sound support could not be loaded. This can be caused by incorrect module parameters, including invalid IO or IRQ parameters".
Despite this the sound actually works when the machine is powered up, albeit with the exceptions above.
I have found a patch for the headphone thing at http://www.disgruntledgoat.com/content/ ... soundpatch which at least means I can use headphones on a train etc. and so not annoy other people. I was wondering if anyone out there has found a solution to these problems. Googling seems to suggest that this is a distro-independent problem I also put Mandriva on this laptop with the same results and live CDs such as Mepis also do the same.
Thanks for any help.